The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [73]
If my ways are directed to keep your promise, then I will not be ashamed. If my ways are directed to keep your promise and I am rendered alone, then I will not be ashamed.
This is the prayer that flowed through my mouth in the Forsythe recovery wing. It repeated day and night, even if I slept through it, even if I shut my mouth. It streamed at such a volume that it shook the room. When I sealed my lips the sound of the prayer beat against the backs of my teeth, fought its way out, the wire so alive with the transmission, you could still hear it resonating inside me.
I was scared to move, afraid to disrupt the transmission as it shook through my person, the nest of wire so hot in my mouth, it burned.
But for however many days I hosted the transmission, this prayer was all I could get from the cable, all that played, and the person behind it did not sound like Burke.
I adjusted the wire, shifted the nest in my mouth. To no avail.
I came to know the prayer with the greatest intimacy.
Your word I have buried in my heart.
I grew so alert to its obvious meanings that they sickened me, leading me to secondary, ironic intentions, disguises of rhetoric I would not normally notice. But soon these, too, felt fraudulent and then I returned to the literal meanings, which had gained more force now that I’d spurned them. That, however, did not last, and by the end the words had shucked their meaning entirely and evolved into a language of groaning, beyond interpretation. Or susceptible to the most obvious interpretation of all.
I wish I could report that the prayer flowed from my mouth in the broken, transfixing voice of Rabbi Burke, a voice I longed to hear again. But it did not. A prayer repeated by Burke would be one I could endure, could grow to love, even blasting through my face so hard I couldn’t see.
But this prayer came from my lips in a horrible voice other than Burke’s. The tones of it were weak and scared. It was a thin voice: my own. The voice I used back in the days of speech. The voice that had never worked very well or much and that sometimes repulsed me, even before it sickened anyone else.
Around the burning wire I spoke this prayer in my own voice, and even though it came from me, sounded like me, seemed in fact to be my very own prayer, I could do nothing to make it stop.
I removed the wire. I spit out the nest. I climbed back on the chair and severed the transmission from the wire to the orange cable, replacing the cork panel in the ceiling so the cable could no longer be seen.
But it didn’t matter. The prayer came harder out of my face, even when I hid in the bathroom, even when I nuzzled up to the fallen old man of Room 4. I’d triggered it myself and now this prayer wouldn’t stop for anything.
28
On a warm day in what turned out to be April, I departed the recovery wing of Forsythe Labs. I was woken gently that morning and from a steel door at the bottom step of my lodgings, goggled men helped me inside a light-soaked tunnel.
My guides did not seek to communicate. They maneuvered me with their hands, herding me to the other side.
Above me holes pierced the arched roof, where harsh portions of sky shone through.
When we cleared the tunnel we entered a tube-framed dome, its roof covered by plastic clear enough to give a view of the area. Outside the dome, the broad trees of Rochester hung over us. From the branches grew leaves so fat, they dripped a green fluid onto the roof.
Leaves already in full bloom, grotesque with life. Temperate air and the sun stalking a route impossibly high for the winter months.
I performed some calculations. The season was spring. Spring was well along now. When I arrived here it was December. I had served over four months in recovery, by myself. It was difficult to factor how the time had passed.
The prayer had finally died out in my mouth, I think. But in some ways I never stopped hearing it. Perhaps I’d simply learned to relegate it to the background.
The morning of my release into the research wing was reserved for procedural matters, decontamination.